sounds. Frances imagined immense, wide-branching grammars and steep, stone streets rising out of other centuries. She felt as though she’d been struck by a bolt of good fortune, and all because the world was bigger than she’d been led to believe.
At university, where she studied languages, she earned pocket money by working in the library. She and a girl named Ursula were entrusted with the key, and it was their job to open the library on Saturday mornings. During the minute or two before anyone else came, the two of them galloped at top speed through the reference room, the periodical room, the reading room, up and down the rows of stacks, filling that stilled air with what could only be called primal screams. Why this should have given Frances such exquisite pleasure she couldn’t have said, since she was in rebellion against nothing she knew of. By the time the first students arrived, she and Ursula would be standing behind the main desk, date stamp in hand, sweet as dimity.
One Saturday, the first person who came was a bushy-headed, serious-minded zoology student named Theodore, called Theo by his friends. He gave Frances a funny look, then in a cracked, raspy voice asked her to come with him later and have a cup of coffee. A year later he asked her to marry him. He had a mind unblown by self-regard and lived, it seemed to Frances, in a nursery world of goodness and badness with not much room to move in between.
It’s been mainly a happy marriage. Between the two of them, they’ve invented hundreds of complex ways of enslaving each other, some of them amazingly tender. Like other married people, they’ve learned to read each other’s minds. Once Theo said to Frances as they drove around and around, utterly lost in a vast treeless suburb, “In every one of these houses there’s been a declaration of love,” and this was exactly the thought Frances had been thinking.
To her surprise, to everyone’s surprise, she turned out to have an aptitude for monogamy. Nevertheless, many of the scenes that have come into her life have involved men. Once she was walking down a very ordinary French street on a hot day. A man, bare-chested, drinking Perrier at a café table, sang out, “Bonjour.” Not “Bonjour, madame” or “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” just “Bonjour.” Cheeky. She was wearing white pants, a red blouse, a straw hat and sunglasses. “Bonjour,” she sang back and gave a sassy little kick, which became the start of a kind of dance. The man at the table clapped his hands over his head to keep time as she went dancing by.
Once she went to the British Museum to finish a piece of research. There was a bomb alert just as she entered, and everyone’s shopping bags and briefcases were confiscated and searched. It happened that Frances had just bought a teddy bear for the child of a friend she was going to visit later in the day. The guard took it, shook it till its eyes rolled, and then carried it away to be X-rayed. Later he brought it to Frances, who was sitting at a table examining a beautiful old manuscript. As he handed her the bear, he kissed the air above its fuzzy head, and Frances felt her mouth go into the shape of a kiss too, a kiss she intended to be an expression of her innocence, only that. He winked. She winked back. He leaned over and whispered into her ear a suggestion that was hideously, comically, obscene. She pretended not to hear, and a few minutes later she left, hurrying down the street full of cheerful shame, her work unfinished.
These are just some of the scenes in Frances’s life. She thinks of them as scenes because they’re much too fragmentary to be stories and far too immediate to be memories. They seem to bloom out of nothing, out of the thin, uncolored air of defeats and pleasures. A curtain opens, a light appears, there are voices or music or sometimes a wide transparent stream of silence. Only rarely do they point to anything but themselves. They’re difficult to talk about. They’re useless, attached to nothing, can’t be traded in or shaped into instruments to prise open the meaning of the universe.
There are people who think such scenes are ornaments suspended from lives that are otherwise busy and useful. Frances knows perfectly well that they are what a life is made of, one fitting against the next like English paving-stones.
Or sometimes she thinks of them as little keys on a chain, keys that open nothing, but simply exist for the beauty of their toothed edges and the way they chime in her pocket.
Other times she is reminded of the Easter eggs her mother used to bring out every year. These were real hens’ eggs with a hole poked in the top and bottom and the contents blown out. The day before Easter, Frances and her mother always sat down at the kitchen table with paint brushes, a glass of water and a box of watercolors. They would decorate half a dozen eggs, maybe more, but only the best were saved from year to year. These were taken from a cupboard just before Easter, removed from their shoebox and carefully arranged, always on the same little pewter cake stand. The eggs had to be handled gently, especially the older ones.
Frances, when she was young, liked to pick up each one in turn and examine it minutely. She had a way of concentrating her thoughts and shutting everything else out, thinking only of this one little thing, this little egg that was round like the world, beautiful in color and satin to the touch, and that fit into the hollow of her hand as though it were made for that very purpose.
WE ARE FLYING OVER THE ROCKIES on our way to Vancouver, and there sits Ivy with her paperback. I ask myself: Should I interrupt and draw her attention to the grandeur beneath us?
In a purely selfish sense, watching Ivy read is as interesting as peering down at those snowy mountains. She turns the pages of a book in the same way she handles every object, with a peculiar respectful gentleness, as though the air around it were more tender than ordinary air. I’ve watched her lift a cup of tea with this same abstracted grace, cradling a thick mug in a way that transforms it into something precious and fragile. It’s a gift some people have.
I decide not to disturb her; utterly absorbed in what she’s reading, she’s seen the Rockies before.
In the seat ahead of us is a young man wearing a bright blue jacket—I remember that once I had a similar jacket in a similar hue. Unlike us, he’s clearly flying over the Rockies for the first time. He’s in a half-standing position at the window, snapping away with his camera, pausing only to change the film. From where I’m sitting I can see his intense, eager trigger hand, his steadying elbow, his dropped lower lip. In a week he’ll be passing his slides around the office, holding them delicately at their edges up to the light. He might set up a projector and screen them one evening in his living room; he might invite a few friends over, and his wife—who will resemble the Ivy of fifteen years ago—will serve coffee and wedges of cheese cake; these are the Rockies, he’ll say—magnificent, stirring, one of the wonders of the continent.
I tell myself that I would give a great deal to be in that young man’s shoes, but this is only a half-truth, the kind of lie Ivy and I sometimes spin for our own amusement. We really don’t want to go back in time. What we envy in the young is that fine nervous edge of perception, the ability to take in reality afresh. I suppose, as we grow older, that’s what we forfeit, acquiring in its place a measure of healthy resignation.
Ivy puts down her book suddenly and reaches for my hand. A cool, light, lazy touch. She’s smiling.
“Good book?”
“Hmmm,” she says, and stretches.
Now, as a kind of duty, I point out the Rockies.
“Beautiful,” she exclaims, leaning toward the window.
And it is beautiful. But unfortunately the plane is flying at a height that extracts all sense of dimension from the view. Instead of snow-capped splendor, we see a kind of Jackson Pollock dribbling of white on green.
